Kanzi, a 29-year-old Bonobo ape, could be one of the world's most intelligent animals.
Kanzi likes to crawl, play with toys, and throw food. He knows a few thousand words—about the same as most toddlers. But there’s one important difference: Kanzi isn’t a human, but a 29-year-old bonobo ape, who’s been living with humans his entire life.
Kanzi is able to understand the English language, and can form sentences of his own by using “lexigrams”—graphic symbols on a computer. To order a pizza, he would combine the symbols for “cheese,” “tomato,” and “bread.” He is also able to physically speak in full sentences.
Although Kanzi isn’t the first ape to learn some human language, he’s one of the world’s most skilled, and is the only one who’s picked up some language through simple observation of other apes, rather than direct training. Initially, psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was trying to train Kanzi’s mother, Matata. She never really picked it up, but Savage-Rumbaugh was surprised to find that young Kanzi began picking up the keyboard and typing in symbols on his own.
Now, Kanzi, who lives with his family at the Great Ape Trust sanctuary outside of Des Moines, Iowa, spends his days playing and communicating with his fellow apes and human friends. He’s able to play arcade games like Pac-Man, create his own tools from stone, and, on an outing to the woods, he used his keyboard to request marshmallows and twigs, then lit a fire with matches so that he could roast his own marshmallows—truly a mind to be reckoned with.
We’re not the only ones who think so: Oprah agrees. Kanzi was recently a guest on her show; see how he showed off his vocabulary skills to correspondent Lisa Ling, and watch a video of Kanzi making sentences through the lexigram system in a research session.